Solasta: Crown of the Magister's upcoming Dungeon Maker is a D&D DM's dream

Solasta: Crown of the Magister was always a game meant to digitally recreate all the fun and imagination of a proper Dungeons & Dragons experience. Much of the game is based off of the D&D Systems Reference Document (SRD) 5.1 after all. So it should only make sense that once you’re satisfied with the adventures that the game has built in for you, you might want to explore the creation of your own. To that end, developer Tactical Adventures has revealed a Dungeon Maker will be coming to the game.

The Solasta Dungeon Maker is set to launch in beta form in an upcoming Spring update for the early access RPG. Ahead of that beta launch, we got to sit down with the devs and have a good look at a demonstration of the Dungeon Maker in action. From what we saw, it’s looking like an inviting, accessible, and versatile toolbox for the Solasta players out there with a creative itch. What’s more, it looks like there is a clear path forward to evolve and meet a myriad of DM expectations in the long run.

Rooms, tombs, and customizable doom

Solasta’s Dungeon Maker begins with a series of very easy to use first steps. You choose an environment, such as crypt or forest (though Necropolis will be the only one available at the launch) and that establishes your dungeon’s biome. From that, you have a giant grid, a number of room templates, a multitude of props, and various triggers you can can work with there. Creating a section of the dungeon is as simple as picking one of the room styles and plopping it down.

From there, you can begin to add locked and unlocked doors to its openings and populate it with secrets, traps, treasure, enemies, and simple flavor props to make it the section you want it to be for your design. Then, you grab a new room template with a doorway opening that can connect to one of the first section’s openings and continue on as you see fit. You can design a maze of corridors, a hive of foes lying in wait, a seeming dead-end with a secret path for capable characters who pass a skill check, or a treasure room lined with perilous pitfalls. Like a template that you populated with your preferred designs? Tactical Adventures even demonstrated that you can copy and paste the design and place the copy again throughout other parts of the dungeon.

What’s that? You don’t what your dungeon to be confined to just one grid? No worries. You can actually design multiple dungeon grids and connect them together to form mega dungeons. The versatility doesn’t stop there either. Tactical Adventures also showed off how dungeons can easily be saved and shared with other players. The team is even working to ensure that mod support in Solasta extends to the Dungeon Maker. You’ll obviously need the same mods installed as the dungeon you’re hoping to open, but that aside, it’s good that user created content will extend to this mode.

What’s more interesting is that as much as you can create your own situations and dream dungeons in Dungeon Maker, you can also use it as a tool to simulate encounters. Once a dungeon is set, you can run it with a preset character party. That said, you’ll also be able to bring your own created party into Dungeon Maker and test them out against various monsters, at any given level and see how they stack up in whatever situation you want. That makes Dungeon Maker double as a fairly easy-access playground for testing out your strategies against different compositions of threats - a convenient extra feature for this creative mode.

Room to grow past v1.0

Tactical Adventures mentioned in its reveal of the Dungeon Maker mode that the mode itself would remain in beta all the way through Solasta’s 1.0 launch out of early access. The team intends to put its priority focus on getting the campaign features of the game 100 percent up to snuff. That doesn’t mean they’re slapping Dungeon Maker in and letting it flounder while they put all of their attention on other things, though. The beta version of Dungeon Maker means just that. They want to get the player response to it, what we want, what we think it should have, and more.

Tactical Adventures were more than receptive to suggestions too. I, for instance, would love to be able to build up a dungeon room template with its locks, traps, monsters, etc. and then have the option of saving it. That way, I can then go into a folder, pull it out and use it in other similar-biomed dungeons I’m working on. This is the kind of stuff the developers told me was totally possible as player feedback helps to form Dungeon Maker’s expanded capabilities. Verticality was also not a feature that I saw in the prototype builds, but will be a possibility down the line. The point being Tactical Adventures has given Solasta’s Dungeon Maker plenty of space to grow and that a good part of that will be listening to the community and taking into account what it wants out of this mode.

Flexible fantasy dungeon crafting

A lot will remain to be seen as Tactical Adventures preps to launch the first public incarnation of Solasta’s Dungeon Maker mode. That said, this mode is looking to get off to an impressive start as both a creative outlet to design your own compact or vast gauntlets of traps and treasure, as well as a sandbox in which to try out your experiments in combat, composition, and strategy at various levels. With an open map and some good starting directions on where to continue to build on the Dungeon Maker as well, it feels like an area of the game that will keep on growing and giving as players make their expectations, criticisms, and desires for the mode known. Stay tuned as Tactical Adventures launches the Solasta update including its Dungeon Maker this Spring. We’ll share more details as they become available.

This preview was based off of a hands-off demonstration of the Dungeon Maker mode in Solasta: Crown of the Magister. Solasta is available in Steam early access now and the Dungeon Maker mode is expected to launch in the next major update.

TJ Denzer

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on Twitter @JohnnyChugs.